Dell Presents at Tech Field Day 9

Dell Tech Center Introduction from Tech Field Day 9

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Peter Tsai and Jeff Sullivan introduce the Dell Tech Center at Tech Field Day 9.

In their presentation at Tech Field Day 9, Peter Tsai and Jeff Sullivan introduced the Dell Tech Center, a rich, online community platform designed for enterprise IT professionals. The community acts as a direct communication channel between Dell engineers and IT practitioners, offering insight and support in data center and end-user computing best practices. Emphasizing its technical credibility, the presenters explained that the Dell Tech Center is not positioned as a marketing tool or a support desk, but rather as a forum for knowledge exchange and collaboration that influences product development and enhances user experience with Dell solutions.

Founded in 2007, the Dell Tech Center has grown into a globally accessible platform, generating between 800,000 to 1 million hits per month and hosting over 5,000 technical resources—including wikis, blogs, white papers, how-to videos, and chat transcripts. The platform also supports weekly technical chats featuring Dell engineers and product managers, where community members can learn about and discuss Dell products in depth. Special programs like the Dell Tech Center Rockstars offer additional incentives and early-access privileges to active community members, encouraging peer advocacy and more active engagement with Dell technologies.

The Dell Tech Center team operates with a no-fluff, all-tech approach, ensuring the site remains a trusted source of in-depth technical content free from lead generation forms and marketing fluff. The site is modeled similarly to platforms like Microsoft TechNet or VMware’s VMTN. In addition to the digital platform, visitors to Tech Field Day were invited to tour the Dell Tech Center’s physical lab, showcasing actual equipment used for content development. Closing the session, the team highlighted the authenticity and community-driven mission of the Dell Tech Center, reaffirming their commitment to empowering IT professionals through transparent, valuable engagement with Dell’s engineering and product teams.

Personnel: Jeff Sullivan, Peter Tsai

Dell Data Protection Product Capability and Roadmap

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Dell’s data protection team has made significant progress developing in-house capabilities and integrating technologies to deliver a consolidated and robust data protection portfolio. By leveraging key technologies from multiple acquisitions and developing a unified vision for backup, replication, and recovery, Dell aims to provide the industry’s most comprehensive and integrated data protection solutions suited for enterprises, mid-market businesses, and end-user devices.

In his presentation at Tech Field Day 9, Srinidhi Varadarajan outlined Dell’s evolution in the data protection space—transforming from a reseller into a developer of a tightly integrated suite of backup and disaster recovery products. Dell’s approach focuses on modernizing traditional backup by integrating deduplication, replication, and virtualization support, with attention to performance, user manageability, and flexibility across environments. The strategy involves consolidating a previously overlapping product portfolio of eleven products into three targeted lines: one for SMB and mid-market, another for enterprise, and a third for endpoint protection on laptops and desktops. Each product line is designed with interoperability in mind, ensuring customers can scale or transition without losing features or data compatibility.

Varadarajan emphasized how Dell leverages acquisitions such as AppAssure, SonicWall, V-Ranger, NetVault, and Ocarina to provide intelligent deduplication, image-based backup, data recovery, and flexibility for physical-to-cloud and virtual-to-cloud workflows. The roadmap includes making disaster recovery more robust, with capabilities like cloud-based VM resurrection and application-level consistency checks. Dell also acknowledged past challenges, particularly early quality issues with AppAssure 5, and committed to improved support and engineering practices going forward. The overall vision is to make backup and disaster recovery seamless, efficient, and centrally manageable, with recovery capabilities that emphasize operational continuity and rapid restoration across use cases.

Personnel: Srinidhi Varadarajan

Virtual Environment Monitoring and Management with Mattias Sundling of Dell

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Optimize resources, monitor performance, plan for growth, and allocate costs across virtual, physical, and cloud with Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition (formerly vFoglight). With this single solution for performance and capacity management of complex VMware ESX and Hyper-V environments, you’ll be able to know now and do now with dynamic visualization of your entire virtual environment infrastructure and proactive resolution of problems before they impact customer and end-user satisfaction. Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition provides more than just monitoring. You get answers, not data, to truly simplify virtualized workloads and ensure you realize the cost saving benefits of virtual technology.
– Experience deep visibility of virtualized workloads through detailed architectural representations and out-of-the-box alerts with expert advice
– Receive actionable insights through advanced virtual environment analytics
– Mitigate the risk of downtime with workflow automation you can trust
– Collaborate and share information easily with peers and management
– Reduce the mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) of incidents in your VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines

Mattias Sundling Introduces Dell vMonitoring Foglight for Virtualization.

Personnel: Mattias Sundling

Dell vMonitoring Foglight for Virtualization Demonstration with Thomas Bryant

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In this demonstration from Tech Field Day 9, Thomas Bryant, Principal Architect at Dell, showcases Foglight for Virtualization, a comprehensive monitoring and analytics solution for virtualized environments. He walks through the product’s capabilities in monitoring virtualization platforms, physical infrastructure, applications, and storage environments, emphasizing proactive problem detection and ease of data interpretation. Key concepts include intelligent data aggregation, customized dashboards, performance baselines, and root cause analysis, providing a unified solution for varied infrastructure management and business needs.

During the session, Bryant explains how Foglight’s approach to monitoring is differentiated by its emphasis on making the collected data useful and actionable, rather than merely gathering metrics. He highlights how the platform offers instant visibility into issues using intuitive visuals like traffic light indicators and spinning discs, and supports adaptive baselining for metrics that vary across environments. Further, Foglight integrates multiple facets of infrastructure—such as storage arrays, networks, and hypervisors—enabling root cause analysis by establishing relationships across components. For example, users can drill down from a high-level view of a virtual machine to underlying SAN disks, showing which elements are overburdened and impacting performance.

The demonstration also delves into the system’s ability to manage heterogeneous environments including VMware, Hyper-V, and physical infrastructure like Windows, Linux, AIX, and even UNIX systems. Bryant discusses capabilities such as chargeback, where businesses can allocate IT resource costs to departments based on consumption or fixed rates, and the customizable dashboard feature, which presents performance and usage data tailored for various stakeholders. Foglight supports agentless monitors, easy deployment, compatibility with various browsers, and integrations with external systems including firewalls, routers, switches, and databases like SQL Server and Oracle. A modular architecture allows customers to deploy and license only the pieces they need, further adapting the tool to suit unique organizational environments.

Personnel: Thomas Bryant

Dell Active Infrastructure Vision

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Dell’s Active Infrastructure aims to redefine the data center by enabling IT agility, simplifying management, and improving operational efficiency through integrated systems and unified management. Presented at Tech Field Day 9, Dell outlines how their Active Infrastructure portfolio supports this vision via modular and converged approaches that cater to both greenfield and existing environments, emphasizing openness, automation, and end-to-end system design.

In the presentation, Dell outlined the driving challenges facing modern IT—lack of agility, fragmented systems, high operational expenses, and frequent downtime due to human error. These industry-wide issues, while widely acknowledged, are still unresolved at scale. Dell positions its Active Infrastructure portfolio as a response to these systemic inefficiencies, aiming to transform IT from being reactive and fragmented to being service-centric, agile, and a strategic enabler for business. The vision includes integrating hardware, software, and orchestration layers into a cohesive whole that allows IT to respond more rapidly and reliably to business requirements.

Dell’s approach is grounded in four tenets: openness, intuitiveness, automation, and a complete end-to-end solution that spans from data center to the client. The Active Infrastructure ecosystem includes pre-integrated systems called Active Systems, a unified orchestration and management tool called Active System Manager (ASM), and workload-optimized reference architectures. Notably, ASM automates complex provisioning tasks down to application-layer templates, not just infrastructure. Dell also emphasized the organizational and cultural hurdles—such as resistance to automation and role realignment—that impede IT transformation, arguing that top-down initiatives and tools designed for collaboration (e.g., role-based access and templating that bridges architects and engineers) are essential for meaningful change.

Personnel: Aaron Prince

Dell Active System Manager

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Dell Active System Manager is a converged or unified management solution that brings Dell’s active systems and active solutions together to facilitate automated workload delivery and comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure lifecycle management. This tool is designed to simplify data center management by centralizing and automating the deployment, monitoring, and scaling of IT resources through a single interface.

At Tech Field Day 9, Dell’s Ganesh Padmanabhan presented Active System Manager (ASM), emphasizing its capabilities in template-driven provisioning, workflow orchestration, and integrated infrastructure lifecycle management. ASM allows IT teams to utilize resource pooling, dynamic allocation, and automation to create and manage workloads efficiently. It features a self-service web portal for both IT and business users to access pre-configured templates that provision resources like storage, networking, and compute infrastructure automatically. These templates include orchestration steps for setup, scaling, and teardown, enabling users to deploy environments on-demand without manual reconfiguration. Dell built ASM with flexibility in mind, enabling support for future infrastructure through resource adapters and offering custom engagement options for non-standard environments.

The demo presented showcased several operational features of ASM, including its ability to discover new infrastructure, assign resources to pools, and support Active Directory integration. Through its admin console, architects can design templates by dragging and dropping elements to define their infrastructure layout and orchestrated actions. These templates can be exported, customized, and potentially shared within a future user ecosystem. Additionally, administrators can schedule sessions, perform lifecycle maintenance like firmware upgrades, and integrate with vCenter for monitoring. While ASM currently lacks publicly available APIs, it’s REST-based and designed to support external integration in future releases. Dell’s vision is to evolve ASM into an ecosystem-driven automated infrastructure management tool that bridges the benefits of private on-premise environments with cloud-like agility.

Personnel: Ganesh Padmanabhan